Welcome to Radio Lear, a captivating exploration of sound and thought that transcends conventional boundaries. In our unique way we invite you to embark on a unique journey curated by Max Sturm, a visionary artist and Creative Director. Discover the transformative power of sound as it intertwines with the principles of metamodernism, bridging the realms of art, technology, and human expression.
Radio Lear
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101 episodes
Updated Weekly
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45
Podcast Authority
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Quality80
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YouTube0
Engagement27
Podcast Overview
Welcome to Radio Lear, a captivating exploration of sound and thought that transcends conventional boundaries. In our unique way we invite you to embark on a unique journey curated by Max Sturm, a visionary artist and Creative Director. Discover the transformative power of sound as it intertwines with the principles of metamodernism, bridging the realms of art, technology, and human expression.
Language
🇺🇲
Publishing Since
9/27/2023
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45
Podcast Authority
BetaFairBased on show quality, social media presence, reviews, charts, and more
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Engagement27
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Recent Episodes
June 4, 2026
The First Path Is Made By Listening
<p>Radio Lear is beginning a new Weird Walks-inspired strand with a music-led episode that sets the ground for future walks, field recordings, local stories and sound-led explorations of place.</p> <p>This first episode is not a walk in the usual sense. It is a threshold. It is a way of tuning the ear before the foot goes forward. The programme is built as a reflective music mix, shaped around the feeling of a path opening at dawn, a gate creaking in a hedge, a churchyard holding its weather, a river carrying memory under a bridge, and a city edge becoming strange when listened to closely.</p> <p>The episode takes inspiration from the wider culture of weird walking: the practice of wandering with attention, following old paths, noticing overlooked details, and treating landscape not as scenery, but as a living archive of signs, stories, absences and returns. This Radio Lear strand is not an official Weird Walk production. It is a local and independent response to that atmosphere of walking, listening and wondering.<sup>1</sup></p> <p>The music in this first mix is reflexive. It does not sit behind the idea of the walk as decoration. It turns back towards the listener. It asks what kind of place is being imagined, what kind of memory is being stirred, and what kind of attention is being formed. Some tracks suggest haunted folk paths and old rural thresholds. Others move through analogue hum, field-recording texture, urban dusk, river sound, tape hiss, distant bells and low drones. The effect is not intended to produce a fantasy landscape, but to loosen the ordinary one.</p> <p>Walking can be a simple act. It can also become a symbolic act. A path may be public, practical and familiar, but it may still carry traces of past use. It may lead past a gate, a chapel, a river, a field edge, a market, an underpass, a phone mast, a row of trees, or a patch of waste ground that seems to resist explanation. The strange is not always remote. Often it is close by, embedded in the routine places we stop seeing because we pass them too often.</p> <p>This episode asks the listener to begin there. Not with a grand expedition, but with a change in attention. What sound marks the beginning of a walk? What does a place sound like when nobody is performing for it? What changes when a familiar route is recorded rather than merely crossed? What does the path know that the map cannot show?</p> <p>Future episodes will move more directly into walking, field sounds and spoken reflection. The presenter will ramble, record, gather fragments, tell folk stories, and listen for the ways in which place and imagination answer one another. These programmes will make room for uncertainty. A story can matter without being treated as fact. A place can feel symbolic without being forced into explanation. A recording can carry atmosphere without needing to resolve it.</p> <p>Listeners are invited to take part by making their own short field recordings. Choose a place. Record one minute of sound. Add a few words about where it was made, when it was made, and what question it raised. It might be birdsong, footsteps, traffic, water, a gate, a rehearsal, a market closing, wind in trees, or a voice telling a remembered story. The recording does not need to be polished. It needs only to be attentive.</p> <p>Radio Lear is interested in sounds that help us hear place differently. We are interested in walks that pass through the edges between the everyday and the mythic, the civic and the dreamlike, the remembered and the newly made. We are interested in the small act of stopping, listening and asking what might still be present beneath the surface of the ordinary.</p> <p>The first path is made by listening. The next one needs your footsteps.</p> <p>Radio Lear can be heard on DAB in its broadcast area and online. To send field recordings, walk ideas, local stories, sound-art proposals or questions, contact rob@radiolear.uk. More information is available at radiolear.uk, and Radio Lear can be found on social media at @radiolearuk.</p> <h2>Endnotes</h2> <p><sup>1</sup> Weird Walk describes its work as a journal of “wanderings and wonderings” from the British Isles, with attention to landscape, folklore, music and the strange textures of place. See: <a href="https://www.weirdwalk.co.uk/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Weird Walk</a>.</p>
June 3, 2026
Listening To The Room – Word, Open-Mic Voices And The Practice Of Attention
<p>Radio Lear is built around the idea that creative audio can do more than carry information. It can hold atmosphere, memory, presence and the small shifts of attention that happen when people gather, listen and speak. In this feature, recorded at a Word open-mic event at Attenborough Arts on Thursday 28th May 2026, we hear poetry not as a finished cultural product, but as a living social act.</p> <p>This is not a full recording of the evening. It is an edited impression of the event, shaped from a sequence of voices, fragments and moments. The aim is to give a sense of the room: the red light on the stage, the microphones, the papers held in hand, the pauses before speaking, the warmth of the audience, and the way a loosely curated event allows different kinds of expression to find their own place.</p> <p>Open-mic events have a particular energy. They are neither entirely formal nor entirely casual. There is a structure: a host, a stage, a running order, a microphone, and an audience waiting to listen. Yet, there is also uncertainty. Someone may be reading for the first time. Someone may bring work that has been carefully shaped over months. Someone else may arrive with a poem written only the day before. The room has to adjust to each voice as it comes forward.</p> <p>That adjustment is part of the art of the evening. An open-mic room is not only made by the performers. It is made by the listeners as well. Their patience, laughter, stillness, encouragement and willingness to stay with uncertainty all shape the event. Culture is not simply being presented here. It is being practised.</p> <p>For Radio Lear, this is an important distinction. Much of the value of spoken-word and community arts practice lies in the conditions that allow people to become audible. A poem in this setting is not only a text. It is a moment of presence. It is a person stepping into a shared space and asking others to listen for a few minutes.</p> <p>The feature includes work that moves through emotional repair, memory, humour, disability access, faith, daydreaming, family, belonging and the return to creative confidence. Some of the voices are reflective and intimate. Others are comic, rhythmic or theatrical. What holds them together is not a single theme, but a shared format: the open-mic invitation, the temporary stage, and the willingness to risk speech in front of others.</p> <p>Kamisha Hawkins brings a reflective and musical quality, moving through shame, fear, grief and self-acceptance towards tenderness and repair. Bavin, Gohel’s “Dear Rome” turns the imagination of travel into practical questions about access, lifts, toilets and the body. Jessica’s poems gather colour, family memory, waiting, movement and inherited stories into a personal map of where someone comes from.</p> <p>Cat Hurst’s piece offers one of the clearest reflections on what poetry can do when it returns after a long absence. Poetry is remembered first as something that once felt like a test, something to be analysed until it stopped breathing. Then it comes back differently: less like an examination, more like an open door. That sense of return runs through the feature. Return to voice. Return to confidence. Return to imaginative attention.</p> <p>Pearl’s contribution is more intimate, shaped around belonging, womanhood, family, faith and the search for a place to stand. Imane’s poem moves across different religious and spiritual spaces, less as doctrine than as felt experience. Lorna Al-Wain opens out into a chant-like reflection on daydreaming, treating the drifting imagination not as wasted time, but as a charged and potentially creative state. Thin Man brings a different register again, with comic exaggeration, absurdity and theatrical release.</p> <p>This movement between tones is one of the strengths of a loosely curated event. It does not flatten the evening into a single mood. It allows seriousness and play to sit alongside one another. It allows a room to move from vulnerability to laughter, from prayer to absurdity, from memory to rhythm, from hesitation to performance.</p> <p>There is a civic quality in this, although not in the formal language of institutions. It is civic in the everyday sense of people gathering, making room for one another, and accepting that public voice does not only belong to polished speakers or professional performers. It belongs also to those who are trying something out, returning to something lost, or finding the courage to speak for the first time.</p> <p>Radio Lear exists for this kind of listening. It is a platform for voices, stories, soundscapes and creative encounters that might otherwise pass quickly through a room and disappear. Recording does not replace the live event, but it can leave a trace. It allows the atmosphere to travel. It allows a listener elsewhere to hear something of the timing, warmth and unpredictability of the room.</p> <p>What stays with this recording is not only the content of individual poems. It is the sound of people stepping forward. The small intake of breath before a poem begins. The papers shifting. The audience responding. The moment when a voice finds its balance. The way humour changes the air. The way a room can hold someone’s uncertainty without rushing to tidy it up.</p> <p>In that sense, this feature is not only about Word, or poetry, or one evening at Attenborough Arts. It is about the practice of attention. It is about what happens when people are given a modest platform, enough time, and a room willing to listen.</p> <p>For Radio Lear, that is the value of sharing this recording. It offers a glimpse of culture being made in real time: informal, generous, imperfect, emotionally varied, and alive to the voices that emerge when a space is held open.</p>
May 13, 2026
Radio Lear Podcast – Traveling Through Sonic Environments
<p>This episode of the Radio Lear Podcast moves through a sequence of sonic environments that suspend ordinary time. The mix is less concerned with momentum than with drift, immersion, and gradual transformation. Across ambient electronics, electro-acoustic composition, kosmische repetition, contemporary classical music, modular synthesis, and post-rave atmospheres, the tracks gather into a contemplative structure that explores memory, landscape, transcendence, ecological consciousness, and the emotional residue of technological culture.</p> <p>The opening passage, beginning with Craven Faults’ “Stoneyman”, establishes the emotional terrain of the mix immediately. Craven Faults’ work has often been described as a form of sonic archaeology, rooted in post-industrial Yorkshire landscapes, abandoned infrastructures, and the lingering psychic weight of industrial memory. Critics repeatedly note the way his music stretches and distorts perceptions of time through hypnotic repetition and evolving modular patterns. The sound feels both ancient and futuristic, as though the machinery of a forgotten industrial age has begun dreaming. The steady pulses and layered sequences evoke railways, moorlands, ruined mills, and weathered stone, but also the strange continuity between human labour, memory, and landscape.</p> <p>This sense of temporal suspension continues through Laraaji’s “Holomin 1”, which introduces a more explicitly spiritual dimension. Laraaji’s music exists within traditions of meditative listening and ecstatic ambient minimalism. His luminous zither tones and gently unfolding harmonic textures create a moment of release from the pressure of everyday consciousness. In the context of the mix, Laraaji acts as a threshold figure, guiding the listener from geographical memory into interior contemplation.</p> <p>M83’s “A Necessary Escape (Part 2)” adds emotional cinematic scale and romantic melancholy. The movement from Craven Faults and Laraaji into M83 suggests a widening of emotional perspective, from landscape and stillness toward memory, longing, and emotional release. The track functions almost as an inhalation before the mix settles into its deeper reflective structures.</p> <p>Floating Points’ “Corner Of My Eye” introduces another key emotional register. Sam Shepherd’s work consistently merges jazz sensibilities, electronic abstraction, and emotional intimacy. Reviews of the track emphasise its intricate drumming, soft organ textures, and reflective atmosphere. The piece occupies a delicate space between improvisation and precision, warmth and detachment, reflecting a wider metamodern tendency to reconcile emotional sincerity with technical sophistication.</p> <p>Kieran Hebden and William Tyler’s “Secret City” expands the geographical imagination of the mix. Tyler’s cosmic Americana and Hebden’s minimal electronic sensibility combine into a drifting psychogeography of imagined roads, absent communities, and invisible infrastructures. The music evokes movement without destination, landscapes experienced not as fixed places but as emotional states.</p> <p>Throughout the centre of the mix, artists such as Max Cooper, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Dopplereffekt, Fire-Toolz, and Djrum deepen the exploration of technology as both alienating and transcendent. Max Cooper’s “A Sense Of Getting Closer” reflects his longstanding interest in emergence, systems theory, neuroscience, and emotional cognition. His work often treats electronic sound as a means of exploring human consciousness itself, not simply as entertainment.</p> <p>Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s contributions are especially significant in shaping the emotional architecture of the mix. Her modular synthesiser compositions frequently dissolve distinctions between machine systems and organic life. Tracks such as “Everything Combining” and “I Miss the Way You Swim” suggest fluidity, interconnectedness, ecological awareness, and biological intimacy. Her music imagines technology not as cold machinery but as a living extension of natural process.</p> <p>Dopplereffekt’s “Multiverse Wavefunction” introduces a colder, more austere form of speculative listening. Rooted in Detroit electro traditions but heavily informed by scientific and cosmological concepts, the track shifts the mix toward abstraction and post-human speculation. Yet even here there remains an emotional undercurrent, a fascination with mystery and unknowability rather than technological domination.</p> <p>Fire-Toolz destabilises the atmosphere further by introducing fragmentation, overload, and digital mysticism. The collision of ambient textures, shoegaze atmospheres, metallic intensity, and devotional aesthetics reflects the psychological condition of contemporary online existence: overstimulated yet yearning for transcendence. Rather than resolving this contradiction, the music inhabits it fully.</p> <p>The Orb’s appearance reconnects the mix to the psychedelic lineage of British ambient culture, where humour, dub, rave, and cosmic drift coexist. Their presence acts almost as a memory trace of earlier utopian electronic cultures, reminding listeners that ambient music has long functioned as a social and psychological refuge from acceleration and fragmentation.</p> <p>The closing section of the mix gradually moves toward emotional openness and release. Marconi Union, John Metcalfe, Ava Rasti, and the collaboration between SAGES, Ólafur Arnalds, and Loreen guide the listener into quieter and more reflective spaces. These tracks emphasise dusk atmospheres, emotional vulnerability, memory, and reconciliation. The final pieces feel less concerned with exploration than with acceptance.</p> <p>Across the entire sequence, the mix alludes to a deeper sentiment structure that connects many of these artists despite their differing genres and cultural contexts. There is a recurring search for forms of transcendence within late technological culture. Rather than rejecting technology, the artists seek ways of re-enchanting it. Modular synthesisers become ecological instruments. Digital systems become vehicles for emotional reflection. Repetition becomes meditative rather than mechanistic.</p> <p>There is also a consistent concern with time. Many of the tracks employ slow transformation, cyclical structures, suspended resolutions, and gradual accumulation. This creates an experience of duration that resists the accelerated rhythms of contemporary digital life. Critics writing about Craven Faults, in particular, repeatedly describe his ability to “warp your perception of time” through immersive long-form composition.</p> <p>In this sense, the mix corresponds strongly with Arthur Schopenhauer’s conception of music as a temporary release from the suffering generated by endless striving. Through sustained listening, the listener briefly steps outside ordinary instrumental consciousness and enters a state of contemplative suspension. The tracks do not resolve suffering or uncertainty, but they create temporary spaces in which reflection, stillness, and emotional openness become possible.<br /> This podcast therefore operates not simply as a playlist, but as a movement through overlapping emotional and cultural landscapes. Industrial memory, ecological consciousness, post-rave introspection, speculative cosmology, ambient spirituality, and contemporary classical melancholy all coexist within a wider metamodern sensibility: an attempt to recover meaning, sincerity, and emotional depth without abandoning the complexities and contradictions of contemporary technological culture.</p>
101 total episodes available
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This podcast updates weekly.
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This podcast is available on 8 platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. You can also use the RSS feed directly.
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No, this podcast does not typically feature guests.
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